LBJ is in his physical prime so he rarely gets tired so he has this along with his height (6'9) & weight (275) advantage over Kobe.

Kobe will always be under-rated & undervalued due to 1 white girls scheming ways! all the praise changed after that incident & there are many arguments/espn made up stats to try to discredit Kobe over & over again every new season. he has been the whipping boy = easy mark simply cuz he doesnt give a damn & just takes it!

I found an interesting quote from Ric Bucher on everyone ignoring KB in the MVP race.

By the way, is this talk of Kobe as an MVP candidate some sort of make-up call or kind gesture as he rides toward the sunset? (I seem to remember a similar drum roll for Jerry Sloan in one of his final seasons, long after he truly deserved to win the award.) Or is it simply a knee-jerk reaction because Kobe's shooting percentages are at career highs? It can't be because he's winning games for the Lakers, because the Lakers aren't winning games. It can't be because he's making the game easier for those around him, because everyone around him is struggling. (The funniest part is that when Kobe was being hammered as selfish was when he was truly making the game easy for his teammates. Being the focal point of every defensive stand and forcing a defense to collapse in a desperate attempt to stop your drives to the rim opens up the game and floor for everyone else. But you knew that.) Sure, he's been pretty good from three-point range and his mid-range jumper is as solid as it's ever been. What does scoring from that range do for anyone other than Kobe? And, no, teams aren't overloading on him to stop him from getting to the rim. He simply can't get there at will anymore. He now appears to be in that category of players who opponents are willing to let score because they don't think he can sustain the effort to do it enough to beat them. (LeBron was in this category for a long time.) Hey, I'm impressed as hell that Kobe is playing this many minutes and being this effective with all the games he has on his legs. He is truly one-of-a-kind and I still love to watch him play. And maybe I'm grading him to a certain extent by what he once was. But he doesn't make anywhere near the same impact he once did, no matter what his personal stats say, and the Lakers' record is a direct reflection of that.